Planet Impact

Manthan Shah
Planet Impact

Planet Impact is a show on how non-conformist individuals are changing the world. In this show, we speak with the most impactful individuals such as the Ashoka fellows, Forbes 30 under 30 nominees, and TEDx Speakers. With support from Google-PRX, Bridge from Billions and Ashoka, this podcast aims to inspire everyone to become a changemaker.

  1. Ep. 28. Ara Kusuma: Founder of Aha! Project, Co-leader at Ashoka Young Changemaker and a Nat Geo Young Explorer

    10/15/2021

    Ep. 28. Ara Kusuma: Founder of Aha! Project, Co-leader at Ashoka Young Changemaker and a Nat Geo Young Explorer

    Ara is the founder of the Aha! Project (www.ahaproject.id | @aha.projectid ). It is a social initiative that provides quality and fun learning tools for young students at home. Within less than 12 months since its inception, her initiative has already impacted ~2,400 children across 13 provinces and 35 villages in Indonesia.  "We need every one of us to take action and solve the problems we face around us, instead of waiting for a hero and demanding the change from other people we all must reflect and understand what can we do to make the world a better place". Background:  Ara is a serial social entrepreneur and she began her social entrepreneurial journey at 10 years of age with the Moo's project 🐄. Ara was quickly recognized as a Changemaker of the future, and she became an Ashoka Youth Venturer at the age of 11.  Growing up, Ara experienced a range of schooling systems. In her elementary years, she was home-schooled, then she went to a local school, followed by a stint as an international undergraduate student living in a new country. Following her studies in marketing and management in Singapore, she returned to Indonesia and at the age of 21, and started a travel-learning project URTravelearner to help others envision changemaker lives by seeing social entrepreneurs in action.  In 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic stuck, she launched Aha! Project, a scheme to improve the access of study resources for children during the pandemic. A Changemaker in every sense, in this podcast episode Ara shares her journey of correcting the problems she sees in the world, keeping her eyes open to new ways of making an impact and paying it forward.  Recommendations:  Book: Totto-Chan: The Little Girl at the Window by Tetsuko Kuroyanagi Get in touch with Ara: Ara's Instagram and LinkedIn Aha! Project website, and Instagram

    31 min
  2. 10/08/2021

    Ep. 27. Mesut Keskin: Founder-CEO, E-Bursum, Turkey

    Mesut is an Ashoka Fellow, and founder-CEO of E-Bursum. E-Bursum is the biggest educational finance platform in Turkey that digitizes and democratizes financial opportunities for students. Background:  Mesut established E-bursum to build a democratization and digitization movement aiming to make student scholarships and loans more transparent, fair, and impactful in Turkey. Mesut is turning a dysfunctional financial instrument in education into an empowerment tool and fundamentally changing the ways scholarship givers and recipients interact with one another. Mesut grew up in a large family in Eastern Turkey. When a devastating earthquake hit their city and his father’s business went into bankruptcy in 2011, Mesut came across financial hardship for the first time in his life. Having spent his youth years away from home, in boarding schools, Mesut mentioned his first year at the university as the hardest one of his life due to many other problems following the earthquake incidence. Mesut spent his first year at university searching for scholarships, loans, and flexible job opportunities while observing many others like him dropping out of school or ending up homeless. Being one of the members of the city council at the age of 18, Mesut tried his best to persuade municipalities to build living centers for homeless students. After failing in this exert, he started to contemplate the ways of building a democratic and transparent system that triggers citizens to work for the overall wealth of the youngsters. A computer engineer by education, Mesut started to design an online platform to ease the processes of scholarship applications and evaluations by the age of 20. After the launch of the beta version of E-bursum, Mesut kept innovating and improving his platform, while also noticing other challenges youth face because of financial difficulties in Turkey. He dedicated himself to solving these problems one by one by using the opportunities of 21st century, especially the internet and new technologies. Links: Mesut Keskin | LinkedIn

    39 min
5
out of 5
4 Ratings

About

Planet Impact is a show on how non-conformist individuals are changing the world. In this show, we speak with the most impactful individuals such as the Ashoka fellows, Forbes 30 under 30 nominees, and TEDx Speakers. With support from Google-PRX, Bridge from Billions and Ashoka, this podcast aims to inspire everyone to become a changemaker.

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